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Updated: May 16, 2025
Napoleon was entering Moscow in triumph. It was night, and the streets of the Russian capital were deserted, but at a window of one house past which the victorious troops were marching sat a French lady, eagerly scanning the faces of the officers. Her husband, Captain Ladoinski, of the Polish Lancers, was somewhere among the troops, but she failed to recognise him as he rode by.
They had served his purpose, and he would reward them, not with the freedom he had promised, but with the intimation that they were now his subjects. It was a terrible disappointment, but Captain Ladoinski consoled himself with the belief that French rule would not be so hard to bear as the Russian had been. The fire spread apace.
'And, wherefore, she said to her husband, as we read in Watson's Heroic Women of History, 'should Poland find such solitary grace in the eyes of Europe's conquerors? Shall all the nations lie prostrate at his feet, and Poland alone be permitted to stand by his side as an equal? Be wise, my dear Ladoinski. You confess that the conqueror lent but a lifeless ear to the war-cry of your country.
Madame Ladoinski wept quietly; but as night began to draw nigh she determined to cross the bridge, thinking that she and her boy might as well risk being crushed on the bridge as being shot by the enemy. But when she saw the crowd of human beings turned by terror into demons, she decided to remain where she was.
The Russian fled at the approach of the Polish Lancers, and Captain Ladoinski lifted his wife and child on to his horse without recognising them. Then quickly he put his horse to the river, and soon they were plunging through it with the water sometimes more than half over them, and musket balls lashing the river around them.
These officers listened quietly to the story of her husband's disappearance, and having expressed their sympathy with her, an aide-de-camp was summoned and ordered to make immediate enquiries among the wagon-drivers as to the fate of Captain Ladoinski.
Soon the reinforcements were passing the wagon, but Madame Ladoinski possessed neither the energy nor the curiosity to glance out at them. She could think of nothing but her dead husband and her little orphaned boy. But suddenly as she sat brooding over her great loss she heard, 'Forward, lancers! uttered in Polish.
Napoleon, stern and silent, passed close to her, and a mighty shout of 'Vive L'Empereur' burst from his trusting, long-suffering troops, when he gained the opposite bank. Soon after Napoleon had crossed, Prince Eugène came along, and seeing Madame Ladoinski he rode over to her, and told her cheerfully that she would soon be among her husband's friends, and that her trials would then be at an end.
A day or two later, when the bedraggled army was nearing the Polish frontier, Madame Ladoinski was startled from her dejection by hearing loud joyful shouts, and on enquiring of the driver the reason of the noise she was told that a reinforcement under Marshal Victor had unexpectedly arrived.
But soon the sound of the Russian guns was heard in the rear of Madame Ladoinski and her fellow-sufferers, and a little later the cheers of the advancing enemy could be heard distinctly. Marshal Victor's force, which lay between these unfortunate people and the Russians, fought gallantly at first, but at last they began to give way, and Madame Ladoinski feared that all was lost.
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